Thank you all of you who have replied to my questions.

In Mauritius it is costly to build a house from wood in the long run
as it needs lots of maintenance.
There are other reasons that makes it costly for wooden homes. Wood is
imported, so is probably more costly in my country than in the USA,
who produces its own wood for construction. And also because there are
few people who work nowadays as carpenters, this increase the costs of
maintenance & building costs.
Those few people who still have old wooden colonial homes spend a lot
of money every year to keep the homes in good condition. Especially
the roofs which are mostly made from cut pieces of wood that are put
on top just like slates are used on roofs, but are nailed on top.

V, I am not sure whether most Mauritians can write English like me,
but I do a good amount of people do write good English from what I saw
in the Mauritius newsgroup alt.mauritius which is the one that gets
the most messages in Mauritius, probably because we can discuss almost
anything there as long as it concerns Mauritius.
And also because it is open to foreigners via Google news. But I also
know that several students failed their exams on more than one
occasion because they had bad results in English language which is
essential to get the Higher School Certificate.

The main ISP Mauritius Telecom (it is also the first) supports it in
its news servers, the other ISPs don`t offer such service as they are
mostly recently opened as previously (2-3 years ago) there was a
monopol of Telecomunications services by them.

At school my best results were in languages, ( we are taught English &
French there, as well as a few other local languages (in Secondary
schools,which are optional, Hindi, Bojpuri etc( mainly Indian
languages, as the majority of the local population are Hindus 70% )
Chinese is also taught in a few secondary schools.
Partly also because I have been going to an English speaking church
since 1982, & regularly English speaking visitors came each year. I do
realise that I often make some gramatical or typing mistakes.

John, I did not realise that Twister was an exagerated situation, &
recently I watched a documentary that showed the various occasions (
showing several years of events) where Tornados hit the USA, in some
of the regions where they there were many homes that were destroyed.
I tend to believe what I see in movies when it is what appears to be
something that is plausible.
Alien is entirely based on fiction, just like UFOs, even if some
people do believe them.


It also showed that at times several Tornados occured at the same time
in a single region just like in Twister.
So this made me think that there are such situations in the USA.

I did ask a friend who is a meteorologist about how in the Twister
movie a scientist sent some apparatus into a Tornado to analyse it. He
told me that this has never been done yet.

In the documentary a scientist had built a mini helicopter with a
camera to send into a Tornado, but it did not say whether it had
sucessfully entered in a Tornado, it did say that the rotor`s might be
damaged there.

Once I read that depending on the speed of wind the names are
different, it can be called a cyclone or a hurricane or some other
names depending on wind speed, but here what ever the spped of the
wind we still call them cyclones, we have had wind speed of over 150
kms per hour on more than 1 occasion.

I have another question to ask that does not concern Tornados.
I read in a magazine once that there is a high tax on property in at
least one State.
There was a case where someone inherited a property which contained a
forest.
He could not pay the high tax that was required so he had to cut all
the trees to be able to pay the excessive tax on the property.
Then later on he could not pay the tax again so had to sell it to pay
the tax.

Is this high tax on land applicable in only one state or in several
states?